Astronomer Teddy Kareta had spent countless nights over the years observing various objects across our solar system using Arizona’s Lowell Discovery Telescope, or LDT. On Nov. 19, 2022, he set his alarm to ring shortly before midnight, in preparation for what he presumed would be a quiet observing night — and woke up to missed calls and messages from his boss. Those pings, he recalled, “more or less could be summarized as, ‘Dude, you gotta get on the telescope right now! What are you doing? Pick up!'”
Just two hours before those calls, at 11:53 p.m. EST (04:53 GMT), asteroid-spotting telescopes in Arizona’s Catalina Mountains had reported the discovery of a tiny but bright asteroid on a trajectory that took it northward over Arizona’s clear, dark skies before leading it to a crash somewhere around Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, near the U.S.-Canada border.
The space rock, named 2022 WJ1, was most likely a run-of-the-mill chondrite, the most common type of meteorite, specimens of which land on Earth undetected nearly every day. Yet the fact that it was only the sixth asteroid ever discovered before it grazed Earth’s atmosphere and turned into a fireball had Kareta and his team racing to observe it before it disappeared into our planet’s shadow.
“Without question, it was the most exciting hour of my job that I’ve ever had,” Kareta told Space.com in a recent interview. “In some sense, we ended up getting a world-quality dataset on a fundamentally extremely common phenomenon.”
Related: Asteroid the size of 3 million elephants zooms past Earth
LDT imagery showed 2022 WJ1 to be just 16 to 27 inches (41 to 69 centimeters) wide, making it the smallest asteroid on record to be properly measured in space. Because the diminutive rock kept getting closer to Earth, and moving faster, with each frame, the telescope had to slew at an astonishing 5 degrees per second to maintain stable images — a pace that even larger telescopes would struggle to match. “It was loud enough that I saw the telescope operator, Ben, jump in his chair,” said Kareta.
Soon, the rock flew out of LDT’s view and into that of seven observatories around the world, a number of skywatchers in both the U.S. and Canada, and a network of meteor cameras operated by the University of Western Ontario. Those cameras managed to capture the stunning, softball-sized fireball glowing a vibrant green as it streaked across the sky before disappearing from view.
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at Space…